By Yours Truly
https://throneberryfields.blogspot.com/2018/08/how-tough-act-would-mike-scioscia-be-to.html
Tommy Lasorda with his predecessor Dodgers manager,
Walter Alston---Lasorda was one manager who succeeded
his organisation's winningest skipper and followed him
to the Hall of Fame in his own right while he was
at it . . . but . . . It's difficult but not impossible for a manager to succeed after he takes the bridge from the team's winningest manager up to the point where he's brought aboard. The next manager of the Angels will face that when he succeeds Mike Scioscia, whenever Scioscia departs. Several others have had to do likewise over several baseball eras.
How have those men fared? Here we look at a few such men:
*
Bob Shawkey---The Yankee pitching great of the 1920s took the bridge after Art Fletcher finished Miller Huggins's ill-fated final season (1929) but refused the permanent job. (Feeling ill, Huggins was hospitalised in late September and died five days later at 51.) Shawkey led the Yankees to a third place finish in 1930 and might have stayed had the Cubs not fired the man the Yankees really wanted if Fletcher didn't want the job---Joe McCarthy.
*
Bucky Harris---McCarthy succeeded Huggins as the Yankees' winningest manager. Harris, who managed the Washington Senators to their only World Series triumph in 1924, succeeded McCarthy full-time in 1947. He won the pennant and the World Series his first season, but the Yankees changed ownership and management after 1948, and new GM George Weiss brought in his own man---a fellow named Casey, who'd erase both McCarthy and Huggins.
*
Bill Terry---Became a player/manager in 1932 succeeding John McGraw as the skipper. Won the 1933 World Series; lost the 1936 Series; managed until 1942 never again winning a pennant. Years later, Terry became a controversial co-leader of the Hall of Fame Veterans Committee, joining with Frankie Frisch in ramrodding as many of their Giants and Cardinals cronies into Cooperstown as they could get away with regardless of those players' actual credentials.
*
Jimmy Dykes---He was once the winningest White Sox manager. He took the bridge for the Philadelphia Athletics after owner/manager Connie Mack finally decided to call it a career. Had one winning season (1952) in three, the only winning season the A's had in the 1950s, as they transitioned from Philadelphia to the Yankees' major league farm in Kansas City.
*
Yogi Berra---Once a pennant-winning manager in his first and then only season on the Yankees' bridge (1964), Berra got the Mets' job after the tragic early death of Gil Hodges in 1972. Hodges then was the Mets' winningest manager; Davey Johnson would pass him almost two decades later. Yogi won an unlikely 1973 NL east (
You ain't out of it until you're out of it) and pennant and got to within one game of winning the 1973 World Series, but was fired as the Mets' mid-1970s collapse began in earnest in 1975.
*
Tommy Lasorda---He took command of the Dodgers after Walter Alston's retirement. Lasorda won five pennants and three World Series in 21 seasons before handing off to Bill Russell, once his longtime shortstop, to finish 1996 after suffering the heart attack that prompted his retirement. He retired as the Dodgers' second winningest manager behind Alston and joined his predecessor in the Hall of Fame. Lasorda's most wounding flaw was an ironic one considering his origin as a relief pitcher---burning his relievers with overwork as often as not before they got into games in the first place.
*
Jim Frey---After the Royals decided boat-rocking Whitey Herzog had to go* after a 1979 finish of a mere three games out of first place, despite his three straight division titles previous and possibly because of his public complaints about failure to shore up the bullpen, Jim Frey took over. Frey took the Royals to the 1980 World Series, but the team played listlessly in strike-interrupted 1981. Fired that August, he was succeeded by the man who'd lead the Royals to their first ever World Series win---Dick Howser.
*
Bud Harrelson---Once a popular Mets shortstop, including and especially their miracle 1969 team and 1973 pennant winner, Harrelson took the bridge full-time in early 1990, when the Mets decided they'd had it with Johnson after opening 20-22. Harrelson brought them home second in the NL East that year despite a rash of injuries and aging veterans. But the following season, he was dumped for the final seven games with a 74-80 record after the Mets---again riddled with injuries, plus a badly mismatched clubhouse---collapsed in the second half. Harrelson's firing was the last move Frank Cashen made before leaving as the GM who rebuilt the team to greatness only to preside almost immediately over its gradual dismantling.
*
Charlie Manuel---He took the Indians' job after 1999 under a cloud, succeeding Mike Hargrove after the Human Rain Delay's execution following the Indians' fall to the Red Sox in the '99 division series. Manuel took the Indians to second in the AL Central his first season, won the division his second (but lost another division series, to the powerhouse Mariners), then was canned during his third over a contract dispute.
*
Ryne Sandberg---Ironically, Manuel's next managerial stop would leave
him the winningest manager (including a World Series ring) in Phillies' history. But the team's collapse in 2013 got Manuel cashiered and elevated then-third base coach Sandberg to the bridge. The Hall of Fame second baseman struggled with dubious in-game strategies and, in fairness, some aging veterans' and oft-confused youth's inability to respond to his stress on fundamentals, the stressing of which made Sandberg a success managing in the minors. He resigned his commission during his second season.
*
Mike Matheny---How would
you like to take over from Hall of Fame manager Tony La Russa? Matheny got the chance to do just that after that stupefying 2011 World Series triumph. The former Cardinals catcher also took the Cardinals to four straight postseasons right out of the chute. But Matheny's inability to manage in-game situations, particularly his bullpens, particularly in the postseason, and at last his clubhouse, perhaps, finally cost him his job earlier this year.
*
Fredi Gonzalez---Gonzalez succeeded Hall of Fame manager Bobby Cox with the Braves. He took the Braves to two postseasons but no World Series; he was executed after a 9-28 start in 2016 that reflected more on the Braves' front office (several shaky trades in 2015) than on the skipper.
____________________________________
A Royal pain: the White Rat
versus his Royals bosses . . .Rats!* What caused the Royals, who'd been to three straight American League Championship Series under his leadership, to rid themselves of Hall of Fame manager Whitey Herzog over a mere second-place finish? Well, it wasn't quite the second-place finish . . . we think . . .
Herzog steamed the front office when he pushed to unload certain favourite players on behalf of younger ones he believed would be better than the incumbents. The classic example: he wanted to unload popular but aging second baseman Cookie Rojas and install a kid named Frank White. Herzog was proven right, as White became the Royals' second baseman of the future who out-performed Rojas's best seasons, but it didn't make him many front office friends.
The White Rat fumed when slugging first baseman John Mayberry came to play Game Four of the '77 ALCS, just minutes before game time, hung over from a wild party the night before. Mayberry played so indifferently, including fielding mistakes and striking out twice with men in scoring position, that Herzog benched him after four innings and kept him out of Game Five entirely. He blamed Mayberry for costing the Royals a trip to the World Series, and agitated ceaselessly from there to be rid of him. The front office finally obliged during the '78 season, but it became another mark in red ink on Herzog's yellow sheet.
Herzog was convinced a sweet swinging kid named Clint Hurdle, who'd just set a winter ball record for home runs with eighteen, could be the power bat to replace Mayberry. But when the rookie Hurdle proved deficient in the field, Herzog wanted to send him back to Omaha to right himself. The front office went ballistic over the very idea that the he would do that to a homegrown kid the powers that were wanted to make the Royals' next star.
The White Rat insisted the 1979 Royals bullpen needed a shoring up with ace closer-in-waiting Dan Quisenberry getting closer to hitting his stride. The front office insisted on nothing of the sort. The '79 bullpen had a ghastly ERA around four and helped create that second-place, three-games-out finish.
Herzog tried desperately to convince his bosses that the Royals were already experiencing drug problems involving four or five players; his bosses tried desperately to convince Herzog that he couldn't go around saying things like that because their players weren't on drugs.
For all the foregoing, the Royals finally dumped Herzog after the '79 season and installed Frey. They got to a 1980 World Series they might have been lucky to reach, falling to the Phillies in six. And in 1981, they canned Frey over the team's listless play and installed the man he'd beaten to get to that Series in the first place, Howser.
And, one and all watched in horror when three Royals---Willie Mays Aikens, Jerry Martin, and Willie Wilson---went to jail on drug charges in 1983, kicking off baseball's cocaine scandals of the early to mid 1980s. Dick Howser may have been lucky to bring the '83 Royals home in second place; he took what he thought was a team undergoing a near-complete overhaul to a division title in 1984 and a World Series championship in 1985.
By which time Herzog was well established running the Cardinals and won the 1982 World Series with a team he himself remade/remodeled as both manager and general manager . . . before the Royals beat their former skipper in that '85 Series. The Royals still haven't inducted Herzog into their Hall of Fame, even though the White Rat is well in place in Cooperstown.
